Pablo Bernasconi

Pablo Bernasconi is an artist of image and word. Designer, illustrator, and author of exceptional picturebooks, Bernasconi creates characters from collages of objects well known to children. He manages to represent Don Quijote with a bin lid, a pen, and a saw and is able to make a rocket from a vegetable grater. He draws with warm colors and writes simple yet profound texts. For all this, Bernasconi is much more than an illustrator; he is an original author and the creator of a fantastic ludic universe.

Born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1973, Bernasconi currently lives in the city of Bariloche (Río Negro, Patagonia), where he has spent his childhood and adolescence. Son of scientists (his mother is a chemist, and his father a nuclear engineer), he grew

up in an atmosphere of study and experimentation, surrounded by books and mathematical formulas. That is perhaps why his illustrations and collages are pieced together from fragments of objects that he first photographs and then recreates in the computer. "My parents' profession made me look at things differently," he declared in an interview published in 2012 on the Sunday magazine La Nación, continuing,

I enjoy observing and observing once again. From a very young age I was surrounded by very special people. I am a pilot; my father, apart from being an engineer, was a flight instructor; he taught me to fly … My life was full of screws, airplanes, aerodromes, airports, and accidents. All of that is part of my childhood.

(Scherer)

Bernasconi trained as a graphic designer at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught for five years. His first piece of work as an illustrator was published in Argentinean graphic media, in the Clarín newspaper and in La Nación, where he still publishes every Sunday an illustrated opinion column about political and social current issues. For that column, named "Illustrated," he has received the Society of Newspaper Design gold medal in 2012.

He has published twelve children's books with text and illustrations, and some have been translated into eight languages. Quetren, quetren (the words of the title onomatopoetically imitating the sound of a train), was created with the help of his ten-year-old son Franco, who has drawn trains since he was two. It is an illustrated album with texts in rhyme that unfolds like an accordion. On each page, there is a colored wagon that is part of a train. Pablo and Franco created the rhymes together, in a game of free association. The first verse says, "Quetren quetren / carries news / good and bad / gossip, discreet / change secrets / for bicycles" (rhymes in the original). The result of that creative game between father and son is an unforgettable story about a train that "celebrates the future, carries dreams, opens windows, walks in the clouds, and over deserted beaches."

As an arts columnist specialized in children's and juvenile literature, I have had the opportunity of interviewing Bernasconi several times. In August 2017, when he published Quetren, Quetren, I asked him about the experience of creating a book with his son. Both as a father and as an author, he found the experience amazing:

I had an idea, for some time, about generating some kind of a timeline from the hundreds of drawings that Franco made about trains, reviewing the evolution and the quest from a children's perspective and contrasting it with my own vision as an adult (or an nearly an adult…). More than an image or a concept, what came up was a desire, a debt to myself, a strong drive that magnetized Franco from a very young age around trains, and therefore magnetized me. When such an attractive field puts itself in front of every possible project, the best we can do is face it and see what comes from it. The truth is that rapidly we come across a material, which is full of possibilities.

(Blanc, Pablo and Franco)

Bernasconi knows the universe of childhood closely, not only through...